Day: March 23, 2020

Self-imposed constraints (the latest from the RB)

Michael Reddell Monetary policy, pandemic, Uncategorized

The Governor of the Reserve Bank had an op-ed in the Sunday Star Times yesterday, and I’d intended to use it as the basis for post today.   The column is quite as complacent, relative to the fast-unfolding reality, as anything we’ve had from Orr since first we heard from him on the coronavirus topic at the mid-February Monetary Policy Statement.  Even last week he was telling Mike Hosking that his level of concern wasn’t really that high (“six out of ten” was his line, and none of it sounded like simply an attempt not to spark a panic, and he told RNZ’s Kathryn Ryan that it was ridiculous to compare what was unfolding with the Great Depression (of course the specific causes are differerent, but when people make those comparisons they are typically highlighting the scale and severity of the drop in output and/or the  –  largely self-imposed –  limitations of monetary policy).  Everything Orr has said on the subject has sounded as if it might have been reasonable 10 days earlier, but not when he actually said or wrote things.   Complacency has been the best description, in a climate in which it is the last thing we can afford from our powerful, but barely accountable, head central banker.

But I’m not going to waste time unpicking the latest column, which it isn’t even clear why he wrote.

Before moving on, this is the standard real GDP estimates for New Zealand for the Great Depression (there are no official numbers that far back, although there were a lot of partial indicators).

nz depression

Real GDP in New Zealand is estimated to have fallen by about 15 per cent, peak to trough, over three years ( as a reminder it had fully regained those losses, though not got back to the previous trend, before Labour’s icon Michael Savage took office in December 1935).

Any bets on how deep the fall will be in New Zealand’s GDP over even just the first half of this year?   It depends a bit on how intense any lockdown is, but if someone forced me to put a number on the likely fall (June quarter GDP relative to last December quarter’s) it would probably be 25-30 per cent (similarly numbers are bruited about by serious people in the US, with the risks skewed to something worse.

And, reverting to the Great Depression, what got things going again then?  Well, the UK –  our major market, and less hard-hit than many countries – went off the Gold Standard in September 1931 allowing a substantial easing in monetary conditions.  And we, without yet having a proper currency of our own, further devalued against sterling in January 1933  (the US threw in some monetary policy easing later in 1933 as well).  In other words, letting off the previous self-imposed shackles of monetary policy made a great deal of difference for the better.

This is a quite different, but for now much more severe, sort of shock.    It seems unlikely that we can envisage even beginning much of any economic recovery until the virus situation is more or less sustainably under control, not just here and abroad.  Neither monetary nor fiscal policy will stop the deep drop in GDP going on right now, and probably shouldn’t even think to try right now (we are deliberately closing things down as part of fighting the virus).

But that doesn’t mean significant monetary policy easing would not still be helpful.  There are those worrying falls in inflation expectations, and more immediately there are the still-high servicing costs of a rising stock of private debt.  Public and private debt overhangs were a big issues, including in New Zealand, in the Great Depression, exacerbated then by the sharp fall in the price level.    It is pretty unconscionable that in this climate, where time has no value, floating rate business borrrowers are still paying 5 , 6 or more per cent interest rates.  That is almost solely because the Governor and the Bank refuse to do anything about significant negative interest rates possible –  it is this generation’s Gold Standard (there was a real aversion to moving away from it, and yet doing so finally made a huge difference for the better).

The Governor likes to claim that the Bank still has lots of monetary policy leeway within his own refusal to take the OCR negative (even though his chief economist told the public two weeks ago that it really wasn’t so)

yuong ha

Really just “a little”.

And I think it is safe to say that we have had fairly confirmation of Ha’s (generally not very controversial point) this morning.  The Bank and MPC issued a statement in which they committed to buying $30 billion of government bonds over the coming year.

It was a pretty feeble programme, even if the headline number was big.  A year is a very long time at present.  And whereas the RBA the other day announced an asset purchase programme centred around targeting government bond yields of three years to maturity at 0.25 per cent, it isn’t really clear what the goal of our MPC actually.  Settlement cash balances –  which is what banks get when market participants sell bonds to the Reserve Bank –  aren’t the binding constraint on anything.

And what did this large asset purchase programme announcement do?   The yield on a 10 year government bond fell by 50 basis points.  That is a big move for a single day, but……that still leaves the 10 year bond rate materially above the lows reached after the MPC’s cut in the OCR last Monday.  Quite possibly, without this action bond yields and corporate credit spreads would have spiked still higher.  So I’m not opposed to the action, but all it has done is to stop monetary and financial conditions tightening further, when what the circumstances demand is a really substantial easing of monetary conditions.    It isn’t as if there was a great deal (much at all, it seems) of an easing in the exchange rate either.   And this was the MPC’s preferred unconventional tool……as I said last week, if they are going to refuse to go negative it really is game over for monetary policy, at just the time when adjustment is most needed.  Recall the 400+ basis point cuts in retail rates we typically see in a New Zealand downturn, all of which will have been less dramatic than what we are now experiencing.  Central banks huff and puff and wave their hands to suggest lots of action, and they have done useful stuff on liquidity (again to stop conditions tightening) but the Reserve Bank of New Zealand is not alone it seems in playing distraction, to divert attention from what little monetary policy is doing given the self-imposed (wholly self-imposed) constraints.

(All of which said, even relative to the RBA, our MPC is not doing as much as they could.  As noted above, they could explicitly target and securely anchor government bond yields.  They could also still cut the OCR, even without going negative: the headline rates in both countries are 0.25 per cent, but in New Zealand that is the rate we pay banks on deposits at the Reserve Bank, while in Australia the deposit rate is lower again.   These are small differences, of course, but there is no sound analytical or systems reasons for not using all the leeway even their self-imposed constraints allow them.

Of course, the much more immediate huge issue is what the government is going to do to underpin the credit system and support a willingness of banks to lend and firms to borrow.  The only secure foundation for that remains some mix of grants and income guarantees (which will become grants).  I can only repeat that the most useful way of thinking about these thing is as the national pandemic economic policy we would have adopted twenty years ago if we’d thought hard enough, been serious enough, about what could happen: undertake to underpin all net incomes at 80 per cent of last year’s for the first year (reducing after that if the issue is still with us).    The fiscal costs are easily manageable for New Zealand: if guaranteeing 80 per cent of incomes than even if full year GDP fell 40 per cent, it would still only be a fiscal commitment of 20 per cent of GDP, and we are starting with net government debt (properly defined) of zero per cent.   It isn’t the exact dollars that really matter at this point, let alone trying to distinguish good and bad firms, but the certainty such a guarantee –  ex post insurance policy –  would provide in capping the extreme downside risks, individually and collectively for the first year.  It wouldn’t stop all exits –  some have already happened, some firms are likely to think it not viable to come back even with a grant/guarantee –  but it is the best option to help stabilise the economic damage, and to ensure that banks are able and willing to play a strongly facilitative part.

On Q&A yesterday the Minister of Finance suggested more announcements very shortly. I hope so but what worries is that once again whatever they do will be inadequate and not really get ahead of the issue. There is an opportunity now, but time is running down fast.

Another sobering chart

Michael Reddell Uncategorized

On Saturday I showed the then-current version of this chart.

aus 22 march

As I noted on Saturday morning

It is much the same locally-exponential pattern we’ve seen in so many other countries.  If current rates of increase continue then by the end of tomorrow Australia will have per capita numbers akin to those in the US or UK yesterday.  That is the sort of impact exponential growth has.

Australia now has as many, slightly more, cases per capita than the US and UK had on Friday.

What about New Zealand?  In this chart I’ve shown the Australian numbers divided by five (to put them on the same per capita basis as New Zealand).

nz and Aus

Perhaps at a very first glance, New Zealand doesn’t look too bad.  But look across the chart not up and down.  Our latest observations are where Australia (in equivalent population terms) was just a week ago. There is no evident or obvious reason to expect that in a week’s time we wouldn’t be something like where they are now  (or if there is such a reason no political ‘leader’ has been willing to try to articulate one).

And yet our government continues to pretend to believe there is no community transmission, confirmed or not.  It is simply extraordinary.  Reversing the presumption now – in light of what has happened in ever other similar country, but most notably in Australia with whom until almost now we’ve had a Common (travel) Virus Area –  seems much the safer option.

Sadly, it seems on a par with how the government and the Ministry of Health have treated the threat from the start.  It was, after all, only about three weeks ago that the Ministry was tweeting, on its official account, that there was more to fear from rumours, stigma etc than from the virus itself.  Nine days ago, on their website they asserted that the risk of outbreak was low.  And presumably acted/advised accordingly?

And then there is the elected government and the Prime Minister in particular (the Minister of Health has been largely invisible and apparently irrelevant).   Because it is so easy to lose track of what was said even a few days ago I went back and read the transcripts of her post-Cabinet press conferences since the start of the you (28 January was the first).  Admittedly the questioning was often equally lethargic, but it was truly startling just how complacent the Prime Minister had consistently been.  There was no apparent sense of urgency, no apparent recognition that significant spread globally was –  if not a certainty – a very high probability against which the whole of government and the private sector should be preparing, and no attempt to get out in front and alert the public to the serious threat that was looming.

Now, you might argue that our Prime Minister wasn’t much different to those abroad, and from what one sees that might be a fair comment.    But it isn’t exactly an excuse for any of them is it, with the full horror of Wuhan already in view by the end of January.   You might also argue that few/commentators were sufficiently alarmed either, which is probably also fair.   But the government is the government –  hugely well-resourced by any other standards, and fully linked in to the intelligence and threat assessments of other countries.  On the economic side, it is not much more than two weeks ago that the Prime Minister was playing down the risk of recession – laughable, if not so serious, even then –  when now we are heading into the deepest (and they are all temporary) and most sudden deep slump in New Zealand history.

When they have finally taken actions, they’ve usually been like knee-jerk reactions (often a mere day or so after denying any intention of anything of the sort, going all the way back to the first China travel ban, which they were bounced into by Australia a day after telling the Chinese foreign minister they’d do no such thing).   And, most concerningly to me, there is simply no evidence of a strategy, and no willingness to engage the public on the options, choices and risks around threats and policies that have huge huge economic, social, and civil liberties implications for us all –  not for days, but potentially for months or a year or more.  It is simply inexcusable, and almost beyond belief (even as we have to watch it day by day).    The four-stage scheme they rolled out on Saturday is certainly no strategy, and although it might have been a welcome start six weeks ago, coming out with no substance in a much-vaunted Prime Ministerial address on Saturday, it had all the feel of having been dreamed up on the back of an envelope on Friday afternoon.  There is no evident strategy.  There is no evident exit strategy for anything done so far, or anything they have in mind.   Some of the specifics even look untenable, notably the detail of their schools policies.

In fact, the more I’ve reflected on the issue over the weekend, the more I wonder how much relevant planning has been done at all.    I was recalling the huge effort that went into pandemic planning in the public sector in abour 2005/06, which I had quite a lot to do with (the economic dimensions of).   The problem with that work, as I reflect back now, is that it was mostly based on something like a re-run of 1918, where a huge proportion of the population was off work sick, or caring for the sick, but that the country was never “locked down”, and it envisaged the pandemic passing through perhaps in waves, but pretty concentrated ones, as in 1918/19.  I don’t recall anyone giving any serious thought to the idea of closing the border indefinitely (short closures sure), to locking down the economy and social interactions for many months at a time.  Perhaps in the subsequent decade, official agencies revised their planning – I hope so, but I was in public sector economic agencies until 2015, and never heard a hint of that.     And given how lethargic the whole of government was in January and February you have to worry that officials, in our greatly diminished public service are just now making it all up as they go along.

One specific dimension that got my goat was the PM lecturing (and that was her tone, repeatedly) the country about stocking up in supermarkets.   She assures that everything not only is  fine now, but always will be, no matter what stage of the crisis we get too.

First, looking backwards, one of the supermarket chain heads at the weekend said buying last week was just ahead of that in the run-up to Christmas, “but for Christmas we have a long time to prepare”.  That seemed like a fair point for him to make, but why had the Prime Minister and the government not been working with supermarkets weeks and weeks ago to emphasis the fast-building threat and urging them to increase production to cope with possible surges in demand.  Such demand was entirely foreseeable, conditioned on a recognition of the risk.  The public shouldn’t be hectored by the PM for what is her failure and that of her government.

But the bigger issue is forward- looking where she has been grossly over-promising.  It might be reasonable to suggest people slow down for a few days and let the supermarkets restock (having herself been neglectful from the start), because it probably is reasonable to assume that supermarkets will remain stocked in the early days of any lockdown.

But the Prime Minister seems not to recognise at all that in such a climate many people will prefer to avoid supermarkets if at all possible, and to have inventory in the home rather than in a public place.  That will be especially so if and when the health system becomes overloaded –  as people warn it may within a month or so –  and people reasonably fear that if they and their families get sick they may not be able to get decent treatment.

And I trust the government to keep supermarkets open in some form or another throughout, and am moderately confident the basics will be kept available –  perhaps intermittently at times, and for some goods.  New Zealanders should not starve (Irish peasants used to have adequately nutritious diets of milk, potatoes and oats).  But, frankly, most people want more than milk, potatoes and oats.  And none of us knows (a) what production the government will deem essential, (b) what factories will still be adequately staffed (and distribution channels have to hold up), and (c) what other countries will deem essential. Because, you see, although the PM talks blithely of international trade in goods continuing, that only means much if international production of things New Zealand imports continues.  As just one example, I just had a look at the back of the dishwasher powder container, and was surprised to learn it comes from……..Poland.  Hard to imagine production of dishwasher powder would be an essential in Poland if/when they are in lockdown.  It is quite plausible that lots of non-basic non-perishable goods could rapidly become quite hard to get.  Buying extra now is utterly and totally rational, whatever the Prime Minister says.  To not do so would mean putting a great deal of faith not just in the good intentions and words of the government, but in some tail-event optimistic scenario about how everything will work in a period –  that as even the Minister of Finance put it –  could last for months.

Personally, I simply have no confidence in anything they say or do anymore.

(And, please note, nothing in this is advocating any particular set of anti-virus policies now.  There are genuinely hard choices.  My kids are still at school this morning (we had the conversation yesterday).  But there is no evidence of strategy, there is no evidence of engagement with the public re what the future holds, there is no evidence they’ve thought through the limits of the state (as Matthew Hooton put it on Twitter the other day, there are some things more important than public health, but what does the PM think those are?) and so on.   It is a pretty egregiously bad performance so far, all compounded –  this is an economics blog –  by the manifest inadequacies of the economic policy response to date from government and the Reserve Bank –  and yes, I have just seen the latest RB release.)